A photo taken by The Denver Post in Starbuck, Colo., which was demolished by a 1933 flood in Bear Creek Canyon.

In this post about the deadly Big Thompson flood of 1976, a list of other deadly Colorado floods included a 1904 flood near Pueblo and the 1997 flash flood that claimed five lives in Fort Collins. But one Front Range flood was missing.

The Bear Creek Canyon flood on July 7, 1933 was a two-mile-long cloudburst that deluged three gulches along Bear Creek, reportedly arriving in the town of Starbuck (now Idledale) in a gush 20 feet high before rushing on through Morrison.

The July 8, 1933 Denver Post is full of eye-witness accounts, stories of heroism and reports of nearly 20 dead or missing.

“Steeped in mud and debris, its tiny business district a shambles, its two bridges washed out and the community marooned from the world, the mountain village of Idledale, more generally known as Starbuck, took stock of the destruction wrought by the twenty-foot wall of water that boiled down its one highway early Friday afternoon,” said one report.

A page from the July 8, 1933 Denver Post maps the location of the flood in Bear Creek Canyon.

Starbuck is often counted among the casualties of this event. At the time of the flood, it boasted a garage, two grocery stores, two dance halls, two cafes, a popcorn stand and a post office (which was also the barbershop, but more about that later), which were all wiped out by the rushing water. “Only somber hills of what had been lively meeting places for townsmen and tourists remained,” said one article.

Photos from July 8, 1933 Denver Post coverage of a flood in Bear Creek Canyon. From top, a stalled vehicle in Starbuck; Denver Mountain Park tourists stranded between Starbuck and Evergreen; a family outside their demolished Starbuck cabin; and the highway below Morrison covered by flood waters.

Today, Idledale is a community of residences, a post office and a church along a roughly one-mile stretch of Colorado Highway 74, and only local history buffs know the name Starbuck.

But that doesn’t mean that the people of Starbuck packed up and moved out. Plans were already in the works to build a road between Bear Creek Canyon and Mount Vernon Canyon Road (Highway 40), and within hours of the flood, residents petitioned to begin the work immediately. County commissioners met in Starbuck the Sunday following the flood to survey the damage and agreed to make the new road passable within days.

The task of replacing the washed out Bear Creek Highway from Idledale to Morrison, however, was a larger one. The state and federal governments rebuilt what is now part of Colorado State Highway 74. The highway department was blamed for delay amid efforts to build the new roadway above the banks of the creek, but the road eventually reopened by early spring 1934. In the years that followed, and after other floods, more efforts were made to raise the road above the banks of the small creek, including a wall between Idledale and Morrison to guard against high waters.

Photos from July 8, 1933 Denver Post coverage of a flood in Bear Creek Canyon. From top, the wrecked vehicle of Starbuck resident E.P. Gates covered with debris; the outlet of a gulch leading into the canyon, which suffered an avalanche; still-high flood waters following the event; and debris on a bridge in downtown Morrison.

It was called “the worst flood in the history of Denver’s mountain parks,” referring to Corwina and present-day Lair O’ the Bear parks, where many tourists and locals alike picnicked and camped. Vehicles were washed down the creek and disappeared, and accounts of victims clinging to the walls of the canyon or barring cabin doors against the wall of water littered the paper.

In Denver, the banks of Cherry Creek were awash with high waters and in Southeast Denver, one article reports, a reader called the paper to notify them of a “voluminous chorus of bullfrogs,” believed to be brought into the city from their regular rural habitat. Another describes the damage to the fish ponds at Thomas B. Howard’s Denver estate, which he kept as a game refuge bounded by Sixth and Eleventh avenues and Ulster and Yosemite streets (present-day site of Lowry Community Christian Church). His farmed fish filled surrounding fields and gardens.

One article even tells some dry tales of how “Tragedy mingles with comedy in flooded Bear Creek towns.”

As Postmaster Peters watched his barbershop-post office fill with mud and water, he reached for his banjo. However, finding it out of tune, he decided it was no time for music and “tossed his banjo into the swirling waters.”

Morrison residents and visitors reached for their buckets when they discovered that a gasoline tank was leaking into the flood waters. “Dashing thru three and four feet of water, they filled their containers against a better day when they will be able to drive their cars over the newly-made mountain highways now wiped out.”

Mechanic Myron Utterback had the only working phone in town at Morrison Auto Supply & Garage, so when a man came by asking to use it, he conceded. Myron pulled out his “prescription whisky” and offered the man a swig, just as he discovered the man was phoning the police. Given the prohibition-era date, Myron choked on his drink. “‘Oh don’t mind me’ said Police Chief Albert T. Clark. ‘That is medicine and besides that, it’s none of my business. Take a good one you’ll need it to keep away from pneumonia.'”

A page from the July 8, 1933 Denver Post coverage of the Bear Creek Canyon flood.

How do authors of non-fiction books do their homework?
Book lovers may be unaware of the amount of research authors do for non-fiction writing. The Denver Post has invited local best-selling authors to discuss the research process. Readers, writers & researchers will be fascinated to hear “The Story Behind the Story” of these wonderful tales!

MARK OBMASCIK
Mark is the bestselling author of “Halfway to Heaven: My White-knuckled – and Knuckleheaded – Quest for the Rocky Mountain High,” for which he won the 2009 National Outdoor Book Award for Outdoor Literature; and “The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession,” which received five “Best of 2004” citations by major media. A movie of “The Big Year,” starring Jack Black, Steve Martin and Owen Wilson, was released in October 2011 by 20th Century Fox. His next book, “The Diary of Attu,” will be published next year by Simon and Schuster. Obmascik was lead writer for the Denver Post team that won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting, and was the winner of the 2003 National Press Club award for environmental journalism.

“The Ledge” by Jim Davidson and Kevin Vaughan

KEVIN VAUGHAN
Award-winning journalist and author Kevin Vaughan has written for the Fort Morgan Times, the Fort Collins Coloradoan, the Rocky Mountain News, The Denver Post and is now a senior reporter at I-News at Rocky Mountain PBS. He is a 1986 graduate of Metropolitan State College. His work has been honored regionally and nationally. His 2007 Rocky Mountain News series, “The Crossing,” which examined the lifelong reverberations of Colorado’s worst traffic accident, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing. He is the co-author (with Jim Davidson) of the best-seller, “The Ledge: An Inspirational Story of Friendship and Survival,” published by Ballantine Books.

“Murder at the Brown Palace” by Dick Kreck

DICK KRECK
Dick is a former newspaper copy editor (San Francisco Examiner and Los Angeles Times) who joined The Denver Post in 1968. He had editing jobs, wrote a city column for 18 years and “covered local television and radio. He has a BA in Journalism from San Francisco State College. Last year, he was inducted into the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame. His books include: “Colorado’s Scenic Railroads” (1997); “Denver in Flames” (2000); “Murder at the Brown Palace” (2003), which was on the Denver Post best-seller list for 22 weeks, and “Anton Woode: The Boy Murderer” (2006). His most recent book is “Smaldone: The Untold Story of an American Crime Family.” His new book is “Hell on Wheels,” about towns that lived and died with the building of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s.

“The Spin Doctor” by Kirk Mitchell

KIRK MITCHELL
Kirk is an award-winning reporter who has worked at The Denver Post for 15 years. Based on his reporting, a department was created in the Colorado attorney general’s office to track down killers in Mexico. He is the author of “The Spin Doctor,” a story that developed from a case he profiled on the Post’s Colorado Cold Cases blog. In it, he recounts the tale of former FEMA spokesman Kurt Sonnenfeld, who claimed U.S. agents framed him for murder because of his videotapes of Ground Zero.

[media-credit name=”The Denver Post file photo” align=”aligncenter” width=”495″][/media-credit] One of the most valuable documents in the National Archives is this original of the Emancipation Proclamation, signed by President Abraham Lincoln.

On January 1, 1863, a proclamation started the United States on a new path, one of equality for all. The Emancipation Proclamation signed by President Abraham Lincoln declared that people held as slaves in states that had receded from the Union would, from now on, be free.

There was no way to enforce such a proclamation. The Civil War was in the midst of its third year of ghastly conflict. Slavery didn’t end overnight, but became the issue that raised the stakes of the already terrible war. More years of fighting would ensue. The North would eventually prevail in preserving the Union of states. But it would be decades, even a century, before civil rights of all Americans began to level.

On this day, the first of a new year, we remember this remarkable document of our history, enacted 150 years ago.

[media-credit name=”The Denver Post file photo” align=”aligncenter” width=”495″][/media-credit] A copy of the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Abraham Lincoln is seen on the wall of the Oval Office in the White House above a bust of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.

Comments Off on Emancipation Proclamation made 150 years ago by President Abraham Lincoln

[media-credit name=”Joe Amon, The Denver Post” align=”aligncenter” width=”495″][/media-credit] A WPA-era Colorado diorama is being restored for display in History Colorado.

History Colorado has cleaned a historic diorama of early Denver, shown as it grew on the South Platte River in 1860. What is it about tiny, detailed artifacts such as a diorama that capture the imagination? Is it the little oxen-driven covered wagon lumbering on a miniature street? A microscopic clothesline stretched between houses?

History buffs are fascinated by the challenges of pioneer living, thinking of the mountain men, miners, Native Americans and eventually, railroad workers who populated our state in the 19th Century.

[media-credit name=”Joe Amon, The Denver Post” align=”aligncenter” width=”495″][/media-credit] A WPA-era Colorado diorama is being restored for display in the new History Colorado center. Judy Greenfield is the conservator.

The diorama was built as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project in the 1930s. Artists who were out of work were employed by the U.S. government to create works of public interest. The amphitheater at Red Rocks in Morrison is another such project in Colorado.

The Denver Post archives show the diorama has been examined before, when it was on display for many years at the Colorado History Museum, History Colorado’s predecessor. These photos show an attempt to pinpoint the location of several of the diorama’s highlights. The next photo shows a store built by shopkeeper Dick Wootton, apparently the first retailer in the Denver area. Below this photo is another picture of what is thought to be the same location (photographed in 1960).

[media-credit name=”All-American Girls Professional Baseball League” align=”alignright” width=”185″][/media-credit] Englewood-born Mona Denton pitched two seasons in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in 1946 and 1947. She is pictured here as a 24-year-old rookie with the South Bend Blue Sox in 1946.

There’s no crying in baseball, at least not for Mona Denton. She is not in a league of her own, but she is pretty darn close. Denton is one of a very small handful of Colorado-born players to be memorialized in the National Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown. The only man from Colorado was also a pitcher, Rich “Goose” Gossage, who was born in Colorado Springs in 1951. (Former Rocky Mountain News columnist Tracy Ringolsby received the hall’s J. G. Taylor Spink Award in 2005.)

In 1988, Denton and roughly 600 other players in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League were added to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in a permanent exhibit, “Women in Baseball.”

At least two women from Colorado played in the league. The other was catcher Lucille “Lou” Colacito, who was featured in a lengthy profile in the Rocky Mountain News in 1992 when the movie “A League of Their Own” came out. She The article called Colacito Colorado’s only female professional baseball player, but the story was appended with a correction the next day mentioning Denton, but it gave no other details of her career. Colacito died in 1998, and a another Rocky story called noted she was an inductee into the Colorado Amateur Softball Association Hall of Fame, In 1993 Colacito she was invited to speak at a symposium on baseball in Cooperstown. Unfortunately and unfairly, neither Denton nor Colacito are among the 216 inductees in the Colorado Sports Hall of Fame for their participation in the major women’s league.

[media-credit name=”Denver Post archive” align=”alignright” width=”300″][/media-credit] Zebulon Pike joined the army at 15 and was an accomplished veteran of 27 years old when he came to what would become Colorado in 1806 under orders orders of Thomas Jefferson to find a river passage through the Louisiana Purchase to the Pacific Ocean.

If you’ve enjoyed a doughnut at the Summit House atop Pikes Peak, then you’ve accomplished two things the great Zebulon Pike never did. He never reached the top of his mountain, and the doughnut was invented in 1847, 34 years after Pike’s death.

Score two points for you, but let’s examine Pike’s resume and see if the lead holds. I would argue Pike is Colorado’s greatest contribution to the American story, worthy of more than Colorado has given back. That’s saying a mouthful about Pike, whose peak is America’s mountain‘, where Katherine Lee Bates was inspired to write “America the Beautiful” in 1893.

Sure, Colorado also gave Zebulon a neighboring national forest, but some perspective: We live in a place that has handed out names to natural wonders such as Poverty Gulch, Big Dry Creek, Bald Knob, Mount Baldy, Middle Baldy and Little Baldy. My man Zeb should have a county or a city named after him, equal to (railroad promoter and Gov. John) Evans, (Ute Chief) Ouray, (surveyor John W.) Gunnison or (state Sen.) John H. Crowley. Sixty-four counties have been named in this state, and none of them are named Pike.

[Denver Post archive]
Mattie Silks led a wild, lucrative life in Denver’s early days by profiting off the wages of other women’s prostitution and horse racing.

Mattie Silks left her name big and bold in the pioneer history of Colorado, but on a chilly Wednesday morning last week only frost lingered in the shadow of her lonesome, low headstone among the handsome monuments of family pride. The name on the marker says simply “Martha A. Ready, Died January 7, 1929,” as if that’s all she cared for anyone to know.

The staff at Fairmount Cemetery know her well. “We get lots of requests for that one,” said Ronda Gruel-Hott, the cemetery office manager.

A hundred years ago Mattie Silks was the famous queen of Denver’s debauchery, the operator of bordellos along Market Street, when the market was flesh that was rented by the hour with the gold of miners and the pay of cowboys. So accomplished was she as a madam, the style of boot she might have worn bears her name.

When she died at 83 years old, she was married to Handsome Jack Ready, but cemetery records show Martha, or Mattie, is buried next to the unmarked grave of Cortese D. Thomson, the gambler and con man who constantly did her wrong.

[Denver Public Library, Western History Collection] Mount Prospect Hill Cemetery was created In 1859 on land picked out by William Larimer, but decades later when the cemetery fell into disrepair, the bodies were moved and the site became Cheesman Park.

Every town has to have one, a place to keep and remember its dead. And to Denver founder William Larimer, a 320-acre hillside on the east edge of his city seemed big enough and lovely enough for the departed to rest in peace. In 1859, a year after the city was established on Arapaho land along the South Platte River, Larimer drew up Mount Prospect Hill Cemetery on a spot Native Americans had considered sacred, where they, too, had observed the customs of death and passage.

Today Denver knows this land primarily as Cheesman Park, a place for picnics, running and relaxing. Sounds of mourning have long since been replaced by giggling children, weddings and outdoor concerts. When they took away 4,200 bodies, they planted trees in the open graves of pioneers, which the city had paid $1.90 apiece to remove.

Not all made it out, and some remains could still be hidden beneath the well-tended lawns there today. Just two years ago, skeletons were unearthed at Cheesman Park while ground crews did irrigation work. Unidentified, they were reburied in Olivet Cemetery.

“Cheesman’s cemetery had a lot of criminals and paupers buried without headstones or any records,” then-city parks spokeswoman Jill McGranahan told me in 2010. Indeed, the first two men buried there was John Stoefel, who shot his brother-in-law over a bag of gold dust, and gambler Jack O’Neal, who was shot down outside a saloon for being a cheat and a jerk. The cemetery filled quicked. Sure, there was the regular rate of death for a fast-growing city, but there were also regular eruptions of illness and violence.

[Denver Post archive] Frederick O. Vaille was just 29 years old when he coaxed established Denver businessman Henry R. Walcott to a saloon to lay out his plan for a telephone company, whose corporate ancestors still ring phones today.

Less than three years after Alexander Graham Bell called his assistant in to work, a telephone was ringing in Denver, and Frederick O. Vaille answered.

Vaille was the first to strike telecommunications gold in Colorado, while others were looking for the shiny rocks squatting in rivers and swinging picks.

Bell’s call to Thomas Watson came on March 10, 1876, and on Feb. 24, 1879, gangly wires were delivering calls to the Vaille’s Denver Dispatch Co. near 16th and Larimer streets, the same intersection that today provides Denver with a Cheesecake Factory.

Vaille was a 28-year-old Harvard graduate who saw need and potential — the future of communicating — perhaps the same way Facebook Mark Zuckerberg’s saw it as a sophomore at Harvard in 2004. He met up with another Harvard man in Denver, local lawyer Henry R. Wolcott, a state senator with loads of business connections. Two years older than Vaille, he had come west to serve as manager of the Boston & Colorado Smelting Works in 1869. In the Denver saloon run by Samuel Morgan, they laid out a plan for a company that still serves this city 133 years later.

But like everything in Denver in those days, from silver and gold to land and cattle, it wasn’t about building a legacy as much as it was about making some money. And at the time, the telephone was becoming hotter than the iPhone today, because it cost $9 to send a telegram to New York City at a time when working all day in company mine paid $3.

Vaille landed the 17th American Bell franchise nationally, less than a week behind Minneapolis and less than a year after New York City. The chance to get rich always draws guests, and seldom are they welcome.

[The Denver Post/Hyoung Chang] Russell Means leaves a meeting with Denver clergy who mediated peace when Indian activists and planned a protest of the city’s Columbus Day parade in October 2000..

As you read this, the ashes of Russell Means are moved by the wind on the sacred Black Hills of South Dakota, where the broken Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 helped push aside Lakota Sioux like himself to satisfy a reunited nation’s passion for land, gold and violence. A century later, Russell Means pushed back. A reservation-born, San Francisco-raised actor, Means was the first national director of the American Indian Movement, in fact, willed it to national prominence. Over the ensuing decades, he became a towering, controversial figure in Colorado, as well. Means was a constant warrior for the great lost causes.

Means was 72. He died from inoperable throat cancer, 14 months after telling the Associated Press he would treat the illness with native ways, not modern medicine.

Sundance Chief Leonard Crow Dog told the Indian Country Today Media Network he was with Means when he died on Oct. 22. “He’s a leader of all tribes, a spiritual leader and a warrior,” Chief Crow Dog said. “He was not originally a warrior, but all the injustice that happened to the American Indians and Canadian Indians, the system made him into a warrior just like Crazy Horse.”